Yoko Tawada, trans. from the German by Susan Bernofsky. New Directions, $14.95 trade paper (144p) ISBN 978-0-8112-3487-0
Tawada, whose novel The Emissary won the National Book Award for Translated Literature, delivers a poignant ode to artistic inspiration. Patrik, whom Tawada obliquely refers to as “the patient,” is a literary researcher in Berlin whose love of art and objects often precludes his love for ot... Continue reading »
Rachel Koller Croft. Berkley, $29 (400p) ISBN 978-0-593-54753-3
A throbbing disco beat powers screenwriter Croft’s stunning sophomore effort (after Stone Cold Fox), which centers on a pair of vampires ensnared in a toxic partnership. In 1979, wily vampire Nicola Claughton spots 23-year-old Amber Wells on a London dance floor. Instant attraction moves Ni... Continue reading »
Ryan Graudin. Redhook, $30 (544p) ISBN 978-0-316-41869-0
1913 Paris, when the City of Light is about to be darkened by WWI, is the setting for this effervescent fantasy from Graudin (Wolf by Wolf). The Enchantresses, a found family of three young women painters running scams and nesting in the famed Pere Lachaise cemetery, butt up against the pas... Continue reading »
J’Nell Ciesielski. Thomas Nelson, $17.99 trade paper (352p) ISBN 978-0-8407-2120-4
An estranged couple reunites mid-heist in this sparkling historical romance from Ciesielski (To Free the Stars). Smitten with one another in the fervor of Armistice Day, Esme Fox and Jasper Truitt impulsively marry in 1918 Paris. Esme, who has no real desire to be tied down to a virtual str... Continue reading »
Stan Mack. Fantagraphics Underground, $50 (336p) ISBN 978-1-68396-916-7
This hefty and hilarious anthology collects more than 300 of Mack’s Village Voice strips depicting conversations overheard on the streets of New York (“All dialogue guaranteed verbatim,” he claimed.) Like a crowded apartment building, the volume’s chock-full of stubborn individuality, and t... Continue reading »
Imane Boukaila. Milkweed, $16 trade paper (120p) ISBN 978-1-63955-078-4
Boukaila’s boundary-pushing debut explores truth, reluctance, and an unrestrained mind. Boukaila, a nonspeaking autistic poet, celebrates neurodivergent modes of thinking that trespass norms and linear expectations through associative logic: “Plotting optimizes thinking/ forcing the motioned streams... Continue reading »
Marcus Brotherton and Tosca Lee. Revell, $26.99 (400p) ISBN 978-0-8007-4275-1
In this tour de force from Brotherton (A Bright and Blinding Sun) and Lee (A Single Light), four friends’ lives change irrevocably when America becomes embroiled in WWII. In 1930s Mobile, Ala., preacher’s son Jimmy Propfield shares an idyllic upbringing with childhood sweetheart Cl... Continue reading »
Sara Imari Walker. Riverhead, $29 (272p) ISBN 978-0-593-19189-7
What is life and how does one recognize it? asks Walker, an astrobiology professor at Arizona State University, in her bold debut. Defining life is a deceptively tricky endeavor, she argues, noting that the claim popular in scientific circles that “life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable o... Continue reading »
Natalie Lampert. Ballantine, $30 (432p) ISBN 978-1-5247-9938-0
Journalist Lampert debuts with a trenchant investigation of the egg freezing industry and the commodification of women’s reproductive health. Doctors first recommended Lampert freeze her eggs when she was in her early 20s, shortly after an emergency operation on her remaining ovary (the other had be... Continue reading »
Eliza Griswold. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30 (352p) ISBN 978-0-374-60168-3
Pulitzer winner Griswold (Amity and Prosperity) delivers a riveting chronicle of the fracturing of a progressive Christian church during a period of social and political turmoil. In 1996, “hippie church planters” Rod and Gwen White founded the Circle of Hope church in Philadelphia as an alt... Continue reading »
Maisha Oso, illus. by Candice Bradley. Orchard, $18.99 (40p) ISBN 978-1-338-84997-4
“Long before a slave ship sailed,/ we shined like bright stars—/ brilliant and beautiful.” In an insightful picture book, Oso (Buster the Bully) offers an empowering portrait of African peoples “before the ships.” Alliterative and assonant lines expound on the lives of individuals thriving ... Continue reading »